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might have set an ambitious goal of pushing Windows 10 to 1 billion devices. But one OS that is doing wonders in the cloud, desktop, mobile, and IoT segment is Ubuntu. This Debian-based open source OS has been on a roll ever since IaaS has become mainstream to run server workloads in the cloud. From AWS to OpenStack, Ubuntu is most preferred OS by system administrators and DevOps professionals.

Here are a few interesting facts about Ubuntu and its enormous growth.

Docker users love Ubuntu – As of January 2016, over 37.5 million Docker users launched an Ubuntu container, which include multiple versions ranging from the most popular 14.04 trusty to the recent 16.04 xenial build. Ubuntu is the base image for a number of Docker images.

Ubuntu is the most preferred Vagrant – Vagrant, the popular, open source DevOps tool makes it a breeze to configure dev and test environments. In December 2015, Ubuntu crossed 10 million download mark on Vagrant.

In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud.

51% of OpenStack deployments are powered by Ubuntu – The OpenStack Foundation conducts an annual survey to get a snapshot of the adoption of OpenStack. The last survey that was done just before the OpenStack Tokyo Summit showed that Ubuntu dominates the scene with 51% of OpenStack deployments. 33% of those run in production. CentOS is the distant second with 28% of deployments.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia are powered by Ubuntu – The world’s most credible and trusted source of information is delivered by Ubuntu. With over 18 billion page views a month, Wikipedia is undoubtedly the largest content-driven web property. Both Wikipedia and Wikimedia run on LAMP stack based on Ubuntu and Debian OS.

Walmart’s cloud runs on Ubuntu – Walmart, the retail giant, is a poster child of OpenStack in the enterprise. Its private cloud powered by OpenStack runs on a 150,000 core compute layer. Ubuntu is the chosen OS for running the entire eCommerce stack and the underlying OpenStack cloud.

PaaS is powered by Ubuntu – Every developer pushing their app to Cloud Foundry, or Heroku uses Ubuntu. Cloud Foundry’s official stemcell for major cloud environments is based on Ubuntu. It is responsible for bootstrapping the PaaS deployment by creating a homogeneous layer for Cloud Foundry. The internal LXC containers that isolate the code run on Ubuntu. Heroku, ’s polyglot PaaS environment also runs Ubuntu.

The most advanced supercomputer runs Ubuntu - Tianhe-2, the supercomputing project backed by the Chinese government is considered to the most powerful supercomputer. It consumes 17,808 kW of energy equivalent to the power needs of a small city. Ubuntu Kylin powers Tianhe-2 supercomputer.

Snappy Ubuntu can run on mobile to cloud – Snappy Ubuntu Core is the miniature version of Ubuntu that is designed to run on anything from a phone to the massively scalable cloud. Based on Canonical's own container technology called LXD, Snappy Ubuntu Core is all set to be the foundation for microcontroller-driven IoT applications to web-scale microservices. It powers the GE smart refrigerator called Chillhub.

Ubuntu runs some of the largest cloud deployments – What’s common among , Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Paypal, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, and Instagram? They are not only the examples of successful web-scale deployments but also case studies for Canonical. They all run Ubuntu.

This article is heavily inspired by Dustin Kirkland’s fun response to a skeptic who questioned the reach of Ubuntu.